Scrabulous Shutdown Spells Crash for Hasbro

On Tuesday, Facebook users in the U.S. and Canada awoke to horror - the shutdown of the extremely popular Scrabulous game, in the wake of a lawsuit filed by Hasbro, the parent company of the official Scrabble game. There shouldn't have been much withdrawal pain, though, since after all, Electronic Arts (EA, which handles the digital rights to Scrabble for Hasbro) had already created a beta version of the official game, right?

Except for the fact that the servers couldn't handle the increased load from all the Scrabulous refugees, and crashed.

"We'll be back up shortly," an apologetic error message read. "We're working on some tech problems and Scrabble will be ready to play as soon as possible!" The game is slated to exit the beta phase in the middle of next month, and some initially found it to be a better-quality game experience than Scrabulous had been.

But in the wake of a server crash, Facebook users weren't too pleased, as the message wall for the Scrabble application revealed. "Wow, does this suck," one Facebook user wrote. "Why can't you guys work out a licensing deal with the Scrabulous boys? Now we're back to square one and have to go through all of your debugging process."

Well, to be fair, rumor has it that Hasbro put out an acquisition offer for Scrabulous, only to have it rebuffed because its creators thought the amount offered was insufficient.

The app wasn't doing that well anyway. Current rating shows 1.2 out of ... yep, 5 stars. Oops!

For those still wishing to get a fix, the old Scrabulous website is still up.